Go to the ant, you lazybones; consider its ways, and be wise. Without having any chief or officer or ruler, it prepares its food i...n summer, and gathers its sustenance in harvest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Those who have handled sciences have either been men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant; they ...only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes the middle course; it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

If we have largely forgotten the physical discomforts of the itching, oppressive garments of the past ... then we have mercifully ...forgotten, too, the smells of the past, the domestic odours--ill-washed flesh; infrequently changed underwear; chamber-pots; slop-pails; inadequately plumbed privies; rotting food; unattended teeth; and the streets are no fresher than indoors, the omnipresent acridity of horse piss and dung, drains, the sudden stench of old death from butchers' shops, the amniotic horror of the fishmonger.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still,--and there was so much sky, more than ...at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one's feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The instincts of the ant are very unimportant, considered as the ant's; but the moment a ray of relation is seen to extend from it... to man, and the little drudge is seen to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then all its habits, even that said to be recently observed, that it never sleeps, become sublime.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The incessant repetition of the same hand-work dwarfs the man, robs him of his strength, wit, and versatility, to make a pin- poli...sher, and buckle-maker, or any other specialty; and presently, in a change of industry, whole towns are sacrificed like ant-hills, when cotton takes the place of linen, or railways of turnpikes, or when commons are inclosed by landlords.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »